Today's managers are full of ideas, theories and information. They have extraordinary knowledge and expertise. They are highly skilled at traditional business thinking. Yet many feel uncertain and unmoored. They find planning for next quarter a tough challenge, never mind committing to decisions that will play out over one to five years. They continually ask themselves what is the new process, the innovative product, the game-changing service, the compelling vision. One senior executive recently told me, "We've lost our crystal ball."
I can't give you a new crystal ball. But I will tell you that being an innovative leader holds the key to discovering what's new, what's better and what's next.
Truly innovative leadership means fostering new thinking and collaboration that produces new business opportunities. It means building a capacity for innovative thinking and using it in concert with business thinking.
Business thinking is based on deep research, formulas and logical facts. Business thinkers value proof and precedent and are often quick to make decisions, looking for the one right answer among the wrong answers. Business thinking is about removing ambiguity and driving results. But ambiguity can't be managed away. As problems and circumstances become more complex, they don't fit previous patterns. What worked before doesn't work today. The cost of failing to come up with new thinking for new results was colorfully expressed by one executive: "The more you drive over a dead cat, the flatter it gets!"
The traditional push for results can go nowhere when the situation is unstable, the challenge is complex or the direction is unclear. No matter how great the urgency, you need to be reflective and approach the situation in new ways. That's where innovative leadership and innovative thinking comes in.
Innovative thinking doesn't rely on past experience or known facts. It imagines a desired future state and figures out how to get there. It is intuitive and open to possibility. Rather than identify right answers or wrong answers, the goal is to find a better way and to explore multiple possibilities. Ambiguity is therefore an advantage, not a problem. It allows us to ask, what if? Business thinking comes into its own after we discover new opportunities through innovative thinking, when we then seek to implement and commercialize those opportunities.
Everyone can develop and use innovative thinking skills. Getting started, however, can be intimidating. Whether your focus is operational or involves your own practice of leadership, you can experiment with innovation in three key ways.
Reframe the challenge. Innovative thinking can be used to redefine, or reframe, a problem. This is not a cosmetic or semantic change; it is a process of reexamining the situation. Often the problem we are focused on isn't the important problem. Or the challenge we've selected is too big, or too small. By looking at the problem in a different way, you gain clarity and insight. By reframing problems, you uncover new places to innovate, or new angles to take.
To reframe your challenge, ask powerful questions, challenge assumptions and bring in multiple perspectives. For example, one executive I worked with was trying to relaunch a product in a market where it had been struggling. In addition to the business challenges, he found himself in an adversarial relationship with colleagues who had previously been involved in the work. He reframed the challenge away from fixing a past problem and toward differentiating the product and the company for the future. That was a vision that could focus and motivate the whole team.
Focus on the customer experience. Innovation begins with really deep, empathetic understanding of the customer. Even the most sophisticated market research operation can't replace first-hand understanding of what goes on in the customer's life and how it is affected by your product, process or service. Get out and watch your customers (or suppliers or employees) work, live and play.
When Dan Buchner of Continuum was working on product development with
Practice rapid prototyping. A hands-on try-it-out approach is invaluable to innovation. Rapid prototyping--building and testing new things fast--jumps past endless analysis to quickly provide the kind of feedback and knowledge that typically takes months or years.
Of course, what's "rapid" depends on the context. Some prototypes can be put together in hours, others in months. The key is to create a small team to bring together knowledge and work quickly. In large or complex situations, you can test out one idea or try partial solutions. Rapid prototyping is common in product development and design, but it also applies to new services and even internal operations. Along the way, keep asking what works, what doesn't, and what you are learning.
Chief executives and leaders throughout organizations know they need to change how they work. Innovative leadership--meaning genuinely innovative thinking and the leadership that supports it--has no predictable, formulaic method. But it is a powerful engine for building sustainable business and fueling new industries, markets, products and services.
David Magellan Horth is a senior enterprise associate at the Center for Creative Leadership and co-author of The Leader's Edge: Six Creative Competencies for Navigating Complex Challenges.
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